Guest Editorial: Special Issue on Applications and Technologies in Human-Centric Internet of Things

Ref: CISTER-TR-180412 Publication Date: 2018

Abstract:In the last few years, the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) and the availability of sensing devices capable of wireless communications enabled a wide range of human-centric applications, such as e-health, smart building, smart grids, traffic, and environmental monitoring. In these systems, people are not only the end users but are integral parts of IoT. Generally, human-centric IoT consists of a number of sensing devices attached to people, which are connected and managed through wireless communication networks. The distributed mobile IoT devices self-organize and transmit the sensory data towards one or multiple back-end cloud-based servers through the existing wireless infrastructure. Moreover, the mobile IoT devices can receive data in opportunistic sensing according to mobile geolocation, dynamic social relationship, interests of people, and so on. Therefore, human-centric IoT enables information forwarding and disseminating within and among the opportunistic communities formed based on the movement and opportunistic contact nature of human.This raises interesting questions and prospects regarding the development of new intelligent wearable sensing device and platform, exploiting sensory data for people mobility analysis, system deployment and localization given unpredictable people movement, security and privacy protection for real-time data communication, network protocol design, and resource management in human-centric IoT architecture. In particular, the IoT devices can get complex tasks offloaded to and processed at the infrastructure, which requires reducing the cost of data collection without compromising functionalities and services. Furthermore, the real-time sensory data collected by human-centric IoT can be utilized to provide valuable and actionable insights into urban planners, and various urban applications can be developed in different business domains.